From Russia
with violent love

>> David Cronenberg on his frosty
mob thriller Eastern Promises

by MATTHEW HAYS

With films like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977) and Videodrome (1983) under his belt, David Cronenberg was once dismissed as Canada’s dirty bastard child, a director obsessed with excess gore and gross-out, low-budget horror.

How times change. Cronenberg is now Canada’s most famous and consistent auteur, having directed a body of work that is unusual, challenging and, in many instances, crowd-pleasing. His last film, A History of Violence (2005), was voted best film of the year by alternative critics in the Village Voice annual survey. Cronenberg’s reputation extends far beyond the arctic circle; he is now widely regarded as one of the most influential and interesting filmmakers working today, on par with Scorsese, Solondz or von Trier.

His latest, Eastern Promises, teams him with the same leading man from A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen, who manages an astonishing transformation, becoming a vicious Russian mob henchman. Mortensen’s commitment to his mob boss is challenged when a well-meaning doctor (Naomi Watts) attempts to find the family of a newborn baby whose mother died during childbirth. The answers Watts are looking for are intertwined with the sordid underbelly of contemporary London, U.K., where organized crime from other countries has found a new home.

Murder, prostitution, rape and kidnapping all collide in a thoughtful screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things). Mortensen and Watts are joined by Vincent Cassel, as the repressed mobster infatuated with Mortensen, and Armin Mueller-Stahl as the Russian mob-family patriarch. People are already declaring one scorching scene in particular, in which a naked Mortensen faces off against several assassins in a bathhouse, to be one of the most ingeniously rendered fight sequences to make it to the big screen in years.

I caught up with Cronenberg at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he was enjoying the enthusiastic responses to Eastern Promises, a film I already count among my favourites of 2007.

DEMONS AND DEVIANCE: Cronenberg

Mirror: Viggo is so great in A History of Violence, but if someone had told me that his next film would have him playing a Russian mobster, I would have told them they were crazy. But he’s magnificent in this film.

David Cronenberg: When I was doing A History of Violence with him, it struck me that he looked very Slavic with his cheekbones and all. His Danish heritage probably has something to do with that. It was a sort of idle thought, because as a director you’re obsessively studying your actor’s face. Once that actor is gone, you’re still looking at that face a lot in the editing process. When I started to read the script for Eastern Promises, I immediately thought of Viggo. Not just because of his face, but he has a very musical ear; he’s a musician and a composer and speaks several languages. We’ve all seen wonderful actors do terrible accents, and I didn’t want that. I wanted an actor who would do an invisible accent.

M: His accent is perfect.

DC: I knew he could do that. He is so disciplined. We had two consultants on the shoot every day, one looking at people who were speaking English with a Russian accent, and another who was checking those who were speaking Russian. It took a lot of time to develop that. The payoff came at the Toronto Film Festival, because a number of the Russian journalists covering it said the accents were perfect.

Queer eye for the mafia guy

M: There’s a lot of homoeroticism in the film, which some critics are picking up on and others aren’t.

DC: I can’t believe people can’t see it! The whole relationship between Nikolai [Mortensen] and Kirill [Cassel] is totally on that level. Kirill is totally in love with Nikolai, but can’t possibly admit it, because to do so is suicide in that gangster milieu. Nikolai knows it and uses it to his own manipulative ends. To me, that’s completely apparent. I’m shocked that people don’t see it. If they don’t, it’s probably because they don’t want to.

M: There’s a battle between good and evil here, but there’s so much moral ambiguity to your films.

DC: Because the characters are all human, whether they’re monstrous humans or not. I always avoid the use of good and evil when they have capital G and capital E. That simplifies things. You see it in politics. If you call something “evil” or “the evil empire,” it demonizes them and makes it easier to kill them without moral quandary. They are really human, even if you don’t like them or they want to kill you. That was my approach for the physical violence in the movie as well. It’s easy for us to lose sight of the fact that violence is basically the total destruction of a human body, a unique creature who will never exist again exactly that way. I take that seriously, so I don’t want to be flippant about it, and it means I don’t want to do it off-camera either.

M: The sauna fight scene is pretty amazing—again, it’s a fusing of the sexual and the violent.

DC: And I can imagine some wouldn’t want to acknowledge the homoerotic element there too, but to me it seems pretty obvious. I wish I could be the first to claim to see the connection between sex and violence, but it goes back about 5,000 years. I’m just acknowledging things that are there that seem apparent to me. We’re in a bizarre place with the Internet right now, where we can see snuff porn any minute of the day or night in the comfort of your own home—courtesy, often, of Muslim extremists. I’m sure they would be pretty shocked to think that I was seeing homoerotic stuff in their beheadings and so on, but I do see it, and very clearly. And it drives me crazy that they’re so self-righteous about what they’re doing, because I see it as a very complexly perverse act. The beheading I saw was like a homosexual gang rape, really. Despite the religious chanting and the beards, it was very apparent to me.”

Crime rules

M: Why the fascination with organized crime in the last couple of films?

DC: I’m not sure it’s such a fascination with the mob specifically. It could also be boring; when I was a kid, Westerns were everywhere, and now, with The Sopranos, the mob is everywhere. When I’m presented with a really interesting project, such as this script, with its great characters, conflicts and textures, then I was eager to do it. I’m not that interested in the machinations of gangsterness, really. Neither film is about how they operate. It’s the same reason I’m not that interested in heist movies. How the safe is opened doesn’t really interest me. To me, living a truly transgressive life, and somehow making it your standard life; deviance that becomes its own normality—that really intrigues me.

M: You still handle horrifying ideas in your films, but I’m wondering if you’d ever be into going back and making a flat-out horror genre movie, you know, the kind with phallic parasites stuck on people’s armpits and exploding heads and that sort of thing.

DC: (Laughs) Well, I’d probably do it a bit better with CGI now. Yeah, I think I could. I’m years older and I have a different world view now. I don’t really think in terms of genre, so if there was suddenly a great sci-fi or horror project, I’d consider it. Those are amazing genres, and I think you can say so much through them. I don’t feel like I’ve turned my back on them.

Eastern Promises opens This
Friday, Sept. 14

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